2. Moving It All

Perhaps the most vexing challenge for Plumer was the campus move. Plumer handled it with aplomb and panache, not to mention without any downtime whatsoever. Originally, the headquarters for Lucasfilm was located in San Raphael, in the suburbs north of San Francisco. The company decided to make the move across the Golden Gate bridge into an area called the Presidio and build a new campus that consolidated its game developers and movie production facilities from several different offices into one place.

ILM's main entrance at the Presidio in San Francisco.

"We wanted to have ILM and LucasArts under the same roof, and to do some experiments extending into game production the assets, tools and techniques that we established under ILM for movie production," Plumer said.

But to do this was tricky. They could shut down production for a couple of weeks and move the entire data center into the new campus. But this would involve idling their production machines and cost millions in downtime. An alternative was to do a virtual move over a period of time and make use of high-speed data connections between the two facilities until everyone and every server and workstation were in place.

Plumer chose the latter alternative and as a result: "We had no downtime. We were able to lease fiber between the Presidio and San Rafael, giving us a 10 GB pipe. That gave us the flexibility to move the back ends and the servers when we were able to do it," he said. "We could move things slowly, retire things. It took some careful planning to be sure. We brought the data center up in January in the Presidio, but the last group of people didn't move down here until September."

It was a pretty gutsy thing to do, especially given the high stakes involved and how dependent Lucasfilm and ILM are on their data center to get their work done.

The 10 GB pipe really made a difference because the system kept running and users could access the system from anywhere at either facility. "We were able to move things in the midst of production, and within minutes of powering up the render farm, it was processing jobs for artists in San Rafael. We have had artists performing all their tasks on machines in the Presidio, and they had no idea that these machines weren't local," Plumer said. "We moved right in the midst of working on Star Wars Episode 3 and War of the Worlds and didn't miss a beat. One of the reasons is because we have lots of bandwidth here. We have a 10 GB backbone, and 1 GB for each desktop."